Do you ever get the feeling that you are being rushed through your days. Rushed through your weeks, your months and even more worryingly, rushed through your years.
It is literally three weeks since Christmas, two weeks since the New Year, and the shops have been selling Cadbury's Creme Eggs for a couple of weeks now. The chocolate eggs are being highlighted everywhere in the press because of the complaints about the 'change in recipe' of the chocolate and the reduction in the number of eggs you get in your 'half dozen' packs.
Christmas seems a very distant memory.
If we are being encouraged now to buy Easter Eggs aren't we being rushed forward quite considerably. Surely first we need to be persuaded to buy something tacky and red for Valentines Day ...
.... or extra lemons and pancake mix for Shrove Tuesday.
There is talk already of 'spring cleaning' when we are only just into Winter properly. The last thing I want to be doing is taking apart my house and cleaning everything, I need the fluff and the dust to keep me warm, so NO I will not be dashing out to buy 'products' to clean my home.
If the dust bunnies get too fluffy, a good hoover and a bit of good old soapy water and a recycled cloth will keep them down until it actually is Spring and the sun once again shines in my windows.
We are being rushed forward to the next thing constantly, told that we 'need' to buy this and we need to buy that to make our families happier, ourselves more successful. and our world a more hygienic and better place to be in.
But how much do we 'need' to buy ... I think it's time for a lot of us to take a HUGE step back!!
Time to assess what we need and what we have. To think long and hard about what we want and why we want it. I think I can honestly say at this moment in time I do not want anything. I have enough food in the cupboards to keep us fed for weeks, enough oil in the tank and wood in the log pile for heating the house. I have enough clothes and shoes to last me a couple of years ... in fact I still feel I have excesses so I am about to have another few days of sorting through things and taking them to the charity shops.
I do not want to buy any creme eggs, nor do I particularly want anything for Valentines Day, a hug and an 'I love you' means so much more than a mass produced card that will no doubt be replicated on many a mantlepieces all over the country.
As for Shrove Tuesday I have flour and eggs and if I feel the urge to join in I could no doubt rustle up a few pancakes ... it seems I would be in good company.
No, I don't want to be rushed through my days ... I want to live my life one day at a time, to enjoy my days not dash through them.
Yes we may be busy, we may have a hundred and one little jobs that needs doing, families that need caring for, animals that need feeding, walking and loving but we can take out of our lives all the extra things that fill up the time, that fill up the space in our heads with their demands. The shopping for things we don't need, watching adverts that tell us we do need them. Planning outings to go and buy things and fighting our way round shops full of people doing exactly the same.
I wish the shops were closed on Sunday as they used to be, to have a day when the only shops open were the newsagents in the morning for your Sunday paper and the little corner shop for that pint of milk or loaf of bread that your forgot to buy. Life was simpler back then and a day for breathing, relaxing and taking stock was available to all of us.
We all though still have it in us to make life simpler and make life special, if that is what we choose to do, and if you are one of the people that loves the hype, loves the hustle and bustle, loves being pushed along on a conveyor belt of consumerism and loves keeping up with Jones, then I'm sorry this wasn't the post for you was it ;-)
We each only get one life, it's not a rehearsal for another one, a better one, a different one ... this folks is it. Our lives. Make your days count and DO NOT let anyone rush you through them ... they are YOURS all yours.
Sue xx
All pictures and images from Google Images ..... who knew there was a whole page there full of dust bunnies :-)
